Prof. Dr. Markku Sakkinen

University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Promises, Problems and Side Effects of Reverse Inheritance

Zusammenfassung

Generalisation may be a more common approach than specialisation to define things in object-oriented modelling and analysis. However, object-oriented languages only support inheritance, i.e. essentially generalisation. The possibility of specialisation as a basic language construct has been brought up in some papers already in the 1980s, but has not sparkled a wide interest. Various names have been used for such a mechanism, including 'exheritance' coined by myself. Here I will use the term 'reverse inheritance' (RI). I took up the idea some years ago, and it looked very promising. In 2005 and 2006 I have worked on it with Philippe Lahire and others at the University of Nice - Sophia-Antipolis in France, especially with the purpose of adding RI to Eiffel. We have found out that there are more problems in the details than we had anticipated. Trying to solve those problems has inspired also new ideas on ordinary inheritance and forced me to rethink about some of my established ideas. This talk will present ongoing work rather than finished results.